Given August III’s significant involvement in Anheuser-Busch’s marketing efforts, The Fourth’s promotion meant he’d be spending more time with his father. This set them on a collision course in a creative discipline in which decisions can be extremely subjective. The Fourth discovered when he began working for Roarty that he had a distinctive talent for marketing—and particularly for understanding the younger generations of beer drinkers whose habits and humor preferences tended to stump The Third. August IV instinctively sensed that the younger market wanted to see ad campaigns that were lively and irreverent, not ones with sappy ads that preached the merits of beechwood aging.
In February of 1990, The Fourth won his first big assignment at the age of 25 when he became senior brand manager for Bud Dry. It was a challenging post. Americans weren’t sold on the idea of dry beers, which are brewed to have less aftertaste. But they were more profitable. The Fourth was charged with finding a way to spin Bud Dry into gold.
Under The Fourth’s leadership, the company began running spots pegged on the phrase “Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry,” and the brand sprinted out quickly after its April 1990 launch, selling double the amount of beer Miller Lite sold in its first year in just nine months. Despite its auspicious beginnings, however, the dry beer category failed to gain long-term traction and Bud Dry ultimately sputtered and sank. That didn’t derail August IV, however, who had already been named senior manager for the flagship Budweiser brand in the summer of 1991.
Budweiser’s branding under his command took on a more casual, approachable flavor and gravitated toward quirkier humor, which proved incredibly successful. His efforts were noted by The Third, who promoted young August IV in 1994 to the high-ranking position of vice president of brand management, which put him in charge of all of the company’s beer brands.
During the early years of his tenure as CEO, The Third demanded frequent, in-person updates from his Marketing Department and ad agencies to ensure that they were developing acceptable new ideas. Each week, he would peruse their new storyboards and assign them the green or red light. As The Fourth rose to increasing prominence within the Marketing Department, ad agencies began presenting their ideas directly to him. He would then take certain concepts upstairs and pitch them to his father behind closed doors.
The relay-style method seemed geared toward molding The Fourth into a stronger leadership candidate, but it also made life much easier for advertising staffers, who used August IV as a buffer against his father. The Fourth had plenty of experience handling his cantankerous dad, and he proved adept at blocking and tackling to keep the company’s creative types free from too much outside interference.
“He would take the bullets, protecting us from the shots that might come from the 60-year-old men on the ninth floor,” said one former marketing executive. “He could take five or six bullets and not drop dead, and I could only take two. He had a thicker suit of armor than we had on.”
“I think that was all part of the seasoning process,” said another former ad agency executive. “I think his dad wanted to see him in action. The Fourth had gut instincts, and he believed in them. He was not an empty suit or the owner’s son. He was a presence and a factor on his own, and he fought for work that his dad wouldn’t have approved in a million years.”
The Fourth’s greatest marketing coup may have been the Budweiser “Frogs” ad campaign, in which three bullfrogs croaked out the word “Budweiser” one syllable at a time. A team of creative staffers from D’Arcy pitched the idea in storyboard form to August IV and Bob Lachky in 1994. It had none of the traditional Anheuser-Busch visual gimmicks, but it was fresh and attention-grabbing, and it had the potential to turn the word “Budweiser” into a pop culture catchphrase. The Fourth caught on right away and served the concept up to his father.
“He took to the idea and brought it up to his father, but his dad didn’t understand it,” said Charlie Claggett. “Nobody was in that meeting. Apparently, they had kind of an argument about it, because it broke all the rules. It didn’t have the ‘pour shot,’ a lot of things. And August III just didn’t get it. He didn’t understand why it was funny, why it was relevant to a younger market. But to his credit, he let August IV go with it.”
The ad campaign wasn’t just borderline bizarre—it was also expensive. No one knew up front how much it would cost to get three frogs to say “Bud-wei-ser,” but D’Arcy’s team sensed that it wouldn’t be cheap.
“So we go and start talking to production companies in Hollywood, saying ‘What are we going to do, how are we going to do this? We can’t just take three frogs and nail their little webbed feet to a board and get them to say Budweiser,’” Claggett said. “The only way we could do it was to use animatronics, which is not cheap. To our horror, we came back with the price tag of $1.25 million, which was, 20 years ago, a lot of money for a 30-second spot that August III didn’t even like very much. But again, this was a company that operated by instinct and feel, and August IV thought this was great. There was a lot of angst and worrying, but they said ‘Okay, do it. ’ So we did.” After a strong set of reviews in a few test markets, the ad made its national debut during the Super Bowl in early 1995 and is still listed as one of the best Super Bowl commercials in history.
The Fourth made it clear to his marketing colleagues that he knew their hard work reflected on him. He told several creative executives in the 1980s and 1990s that his ability to ascend to the top of Anheuser-Busch’s ladder lay partly in their hands.
“The Fourth is a savvy guy and a sensitive guy,” said a former marketer who worked with him closely. “Because of that, he would never come out and say, ‘Will you help me be chairman of the company? ’ But he would say, ‘My future is kind of determined by the work you guys do. I’ll stay behind you just as long as you make me look good.’ He didn’t have to say it, because it was understood. It was kind of his job to lose. It was never like Falcon Crest or Dallas, coveting the job and thinking, ‘I’ll do whatever I can do get it.’ ”
Bob Lachky, who was 10 years older than August IV, suffered at points from the coincidence of being an equal to him in all but family name. Lachky was aggressively courted by The Third and eventually hired out of DDB Needham in 1990 to be Anheuser’s brand manager for Bud Light, but he spent more time than he wanted in that position after August IV was tapped instead to manage the Budweiser brand family two years later. The two didn’t know each other well at the time, but The Fourth took pains to reach out in an attempt to mend fences.
“He came to me and said, ‘Look, I know this was yours, and you deserve this. I’m doing it because of who I am, I recognize that. But let’s work together,’” Lachky said. He and The Fourth became friends that day. “Some people at times saw that as a weakness,” Lachky said. “It is truly one of his great traits. He clearly wanted others to stand up and get recognized. I said ‘August, I’ll forever be indebted to you for that.’ I wasn’t naïve. I was smart enough to know he was going to be my boss one day.”
“It’s easy to bash him,” Lachky said. “But I don’t think there’s a step in that company that he didn’t earn.”
When The Fourth ultimately became CEO, he ended up with less support than he needed. During his days in marketing, he had both a talent for the work and a network of highly qualified and successful people surrounding him. “They set it up so that he always had training wheels,” said one former ad agency executive. “He was set up so that the people around him would make him ready.”
With that support as a catalyst, The Fourth’s tenure in marketing produced a string of hits that marked Anheuser-Busch’s best era. He had a knack for identifying out-of-the-box ads that worked. In 1999, four years after the “Frogs” campaign debuted, August IV pushed yet another controversial spot onto the air that evolved into a similarly memorable blockbuster.
“I can categorically tell you that ‘Whassup?’ would not have run without The Fourth,” said an agency executive who worked on the aforementioned cam
paign, which featured a group of slacker guys who tossed the slang term “Whassup?” back and forth to each other in greeting. “His dad looked at it and said, ‘I don’t get this—what does this mean?’ And The Fourth said, ‘It’s funny, trust me.’ ”
“Well, are you going to run it on late-night?” The Third asked. The company always ran its edgier ads later in the evening for older viewers.
“No, Dad, I’m going to run it on prime time,” The Fourth responded, which put The Third even more on the defensive.
“But The Fourth took all of it,” the agency executive later recalled. “And he said, ‘Guys, my dad approved this. But we’ve all got to hope that it works.’ ”
Legend among Anheuser-Busch marketers has it that one Friday, just two days before the first “Whassup?” commercial ran on network television, The Third and The Fourth were still debating whether the campaign would really work. The Third wanted more time to think about it before giving the go-ahead to the networks, but there was no time left if the company wanted the ad to run that Sunday. So The Fourth loaded some video equipment and a television into the back of a van, fired the engine, and drove up onto a well-known hill in St. Louis where a pack of Italian restaurants was concentrated. He pulled the truck up to the back of one of the restaurants and, with a manager’s permission, showed the commercial to the restaurant’s kitchen staff.
“They thought it was hysterical, and he said, ‘Dad, I’m shipping it.’ And the rest was history,” said DDB’s John Greening, who had been waiting for The Third’s okay. “I remember thinking, ‘Are we going to get the instructions to ship? Or are we just going to run some of the same old stuff?’ The Fourth called me, or maybe it was an e-mail from somebody, and said, ‘Ship it.’ And it was like, ‘Yes!’ ”
“We played it at the convention, and there were 6,000 wholesalers in this big hall in Houston,” Greening went on. “We played the ‘Whassup?’ spot, and the whole place went crazy. I remember there was stuff falling from the ceiling, balloons, and we’re all hugging one another like we had won the presidency or something.”
The Fourth seemed to spend part of every day bobbing and weaving to duck his father’s blows, but he enjoyed a certain level of job protection as the boss’ son. Not everyone was as lucky.
“I had been fired at least three or four times,” said Bob Lachky. “I said that in my exit interview kind of as a joke, but it was true.”
The scariest such episode for Lachky happened in late 1997, when he tried to convince The Third that a series of ads in which a jealous lizard tried to assassinate the Budweiser frogs was a better fit for the upcoming Super Bowl than an ad that starred The Third himself, talking about the company’s heritage. The Third had grown increasingly enamored with his own series of ads, which were controversial, given his astringent personality. “August Busch III has always seemed a little too tightly wound to appeal to the average beer drinker,” one St. Louis reporter wrote in a newspaper column entitled “To Sell Beer Takes More Than a Glare.” The Third had gotten decent feedback on his first set of commercials, however, and was pushing hard not just to film more of them but to have greater say in directing them and writing his own copy. Lachky, on the other hand, felt the Super Bowl warranted a new set of funny commercials that keyed off the successful but stale “Frogs” campaign. The situation quickly grew sticky for the marketing and film staff, who were anxious to keep The Third happy but also convinced that Louie the Lizard was a better headlining star for the year’s biggest make-or-break event.
The debate hit a melting point just before Christmas when The Third was told his own ads weren’t testing as well as Louie’s. He gruffly insinuated that Lachky might as well pack his bags and leave. August IV stopped by to see Lachky later that day and found him despondent, lying flat on his back on his office floor.
“Buddy, don’t worry. If you go, I go,” The Fourth said in an effort to console his colleague, who was trying to sort out how to provide for his young children.
“August, don’t even go there,” Lachky said with a roll of his eyes. “Give me a break. You’re not going anywhere.”
“You’ll be fine,” The Fourth replied. “Don’t worry, it’s just temporary.”
Sure enough, August IV convinced his father to review the positive feedback on Louie the Lizard over the holidays, and Lachky’s job was still there when he returned. The stress and pressure had been almost unbearable, however, and Lachky found himself empathizing more with The Fourth’s plight than ever before.
“August IV was going through this every day,” Lachky said. “Can you imagine what that would be like, where every single day of your existence is getting through this kind of grind? I go through this three or four times in my career. He’s been ‘fired ’ every day of his life. Every single day, he’s going through this.”
“What people don’t give him credit for is that the role he played, in terms of protecting people like myself and what we believed in, eventually wears you down.”
The Fourth’s dealings with his father were never easy. August III’s life and behavior were not without their share of irony, and one of the greatest examples, perhaps, is that while he focused with razor-sharp intensity on never making the same mistake twice at Anheuser-Busch —and while he ridiculed, punished, and sometimes fired those who did—he repeated some of his father’s worst mistakes at home. The tension between The Third and some of his half-siblings was well-chronicled, but when he married his second wife, Ginny, and had two children with her, he not only let a rivalry develop between half-brothers Steven and August IV but appeared to relish pitting them against each other.
“That’s part of the whole father/son dynamic,” said fellow Busch clan member Reisinger. “When Prince Charles was born, from the minute he was born every single person in England who supported royalty said, ‘Okay, this is the future king. Prepare him. From the second the guy was born, they’re preparing him and saying, ‘You’re the one, and we’re going to make you ready and be there for you.’ ”
With August IV, Reisinger said, “It was always sort of like ‘We’ll see, we’ll see.’ No support, tear you down, tear you down . . . it’s the extreme opposite approach. If you were told forever that you just may never be ready or you’re not good enough, what are you going to think about yourself ? That level of mental battering and torture is not good. Why that happened, who knows—but it’s a whole different approach. It’s unfortunate.”
Steven was 13 years younger than August IV. The Third started to pull him into meetings and assign him roles within the company once Steven matured into a young teenager. Some Anheuser-Busch staffers thought the perceived rivalry between August IV and Steven would morph into the next Busch generation’s battle royal. “There was a time where people would say to The Fourth: ‘Hey, it’s his mom going to bed with him every night, not your mom,” said one former Anheuser-Busch employee. Speculation was already running rampant in 1991, when Steven was only 12, that he might challenge The Fourth to the throne. “We just hope it doesn’t come to that,” The Fourth’s mother said. In 2002, when Steven was 25, people close to the company said that August IV believed that his stepmother, Ginny, wanted Steven to take over the company. “For the past 12 years, The Fourth has said openly that his stepmother wants him to fail and her son Steve to run the joint,” said one insider. “I don’t know that it’s true, but it’s true that The Fourth feels that way.”
Others, however, never saw Steven as much more than a distraction. He spent five years working as his father’s executive assistant, rather than swapping into new roles at the company to broaden his expertise. When most up-and-comers were pulled into Anheuser-Busch’s antiquated executive assistant program, in which they tailed a particular executive for years, half in mentorship and half in servitude, they’d stick around for one to three years before moving elsewhere to be molded for leadership. Steven’s stasis in the job made his candidacy for a higher position less and less viable as time wore on.
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p; “I never bought the Steven thing,” said one strategy committee member. “He was never a factor. He was never a threat. He was just his father’s sidekick. He would have been destroyed Day One.”
Steven eventually started backing away from the business, and in October of 2006, less than a month after the board voted to install The Fourth as CEO, 29-year-old Steven left Anheuser-Busch altogether and purchased Krey Distributing, one of the company’s most lucrative independent distributors, which was based near St. Louis and had been run by The Third’s best friend from his school days. “I couldn’t be happier with the career choice I’ve made,” Steven told one local publication. “My brother is going to do a great job for us running the brewery. He’s the guy that was groomed for it and is in the job, and it’s a great fit. That wasn’t something I was looking for.” August IV’s sister, Susie Busch Transou, who had rejoined Anheuser-Busch after completing an MBA, also left the company to run Tri-Eagle Sales, an Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband.
It was hard to blame The Fourth’s siblings for backing away from the spotlight. Running the company was an incredibly heavy cross to bear, and just like other Busches who had avoided corporate work over the decades, they stood to be fabulously wealthy for the rest of their lives even if they never spent another day at Anheuser-Busch headquarters. Why take on the added burden?
Their departures eliminated an effective point of leverage for The Third, however. “When Steven left and his sister Susie left, I was very surprised. I think August III really loved hanging Steven, in particular, over The Fourth’s head,” said one former Anheuser-Busch employee.
In November 1996, a 32-year-old August IV was named vice president of marketing, which made him responsible for the entire brewery’s marketing and sales activities and put him in a position to report directly to Patrick Stokes, the brewery’s president. August III seemed supremely confident that his son would keep Anheuser-Busch ahead of the pack. Its advertising was winning back young beer drinkers who had been abandoning Budweiser throughout the earlier 1990s. Profits were rising again at a double-digit pace. And the company’s stock was up.
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